“Den has a heart after all,” she said on the first night of our covert mission, climbing into the biohazard suit the sterilization techs wore when handling unprocessed bodies. And who wouldn’t want to help?
“We can only give you this,” a teenage boy with his grandfather told us after we presented them with a cardboard urn. He pulled out his phone and transferred fifty funerary tokens to my account, handed me a tote bag filled with food. After the initial group of families left, Mr. Leung, Val, and I ate the dumplings they gave us on the embalming table.
Everyone Mr. Leung brought to us over the next few nights was solemn and thankful.
“Is that enough?” they would always ask. “We’re sorry we don’t have much to offer.”
“It’s fine,” I’d answer. Because money was never the reason and, honestly, I would have done it for free if they hadn’t insisted. It made me feel good. They burned incense and held each other and cried while gazing at photos of their relatives. I bowed my head in respect. Once upon a time this was how we dealt with death. But something snapped in us when the dead could no longer be contained, when people didn’t really get to say goodbye. Cryogenic suspension companies proliferated, death hotels, services that preserved and posed your loved ones in fun positions, travel companies that promised a “natural” getaway with your recently departed. I remember Mr. Fang reminding us upon hire to always exude customer service, to never upset the guests, to remember that we were a hotel first and foremost, a funeral home second.
One night after helping Mr. Leung on my own, I grabbed my bourbon from the dryer and headed to the fire escape. Val was already out there, blowing smoke rings around the silhouette of a ballet dancer projected at the top of the Salesforce Tower. It was advertising the mayor’s Festival of Resilience, meant to boost city morale. Of course, most people just needed better support services—soup kitchens, counseling sessions, government-sponsored funerary packages.
Val wiped the tears from her face and handed me the joint. “I wonder if places like this will last now that they’re rolling out new treatments. People are lingering in comas. There’s hope. Maybe we’re all working on borrowed time.”
I shrugged and took a long drag.
“How’d it go today?”
“The usual,” I said. I felt a little bad saying this, but helping Mr. Leung dispose of the bodies had become a routine. “I mean . . .”
“Yeah, I get it,” Val said. “Don’t think too much about the job.”
“Do you like Starship?”
“The what now?”
“Like the band.”
“No feelings either way, I guess.”
“Do you mind?” I took out my phone and found the album Knee Deep in the Hoopla, and pressed play. My father had given me the cassette when I was little, and I couldn’t shake these tunes that I’d once fallen asleep to as a kid, no matter how hard I tried.
“This is really bad,” Val said. “But like in a good way.”
We dangled our feet in the air, draped a blanket across our shoulders. I continued to ignore my brother’s messages buzzing in my pocket, finally switching off my phone. I could tell Val wanted to say something, but she let it go for once. She rested her head on my shoulder, and we counted the tiny explosions from the welders attaching wind turbines that looked like gigantic tulips across the otherwise dark Financial District.
My brother tried to call me repeatedly when my father died of plague complications. Most would say I should have learned a lesson from this, grown from the experience, but I’ve been too busy running away from it. And then there was the voicemail my mother left after the funeral, a duration of eight minutes and thirty-two seconds, which I deleted without listening. Sometimes I fantasize about that message, waffling back and forth between “We love you, Dennis. Please come back,” and “Your father died disappointed in you.”
The last time I saw my father was ten years before his death. I had crawled back home after failing to launch a career in my twenties, my credit cards maxed out from years of trying to keep up with my more successful friends, buying drinks for strangers who I thought could open professional doors. I’d started stealing from my job at Patagonia—a few dollars here and there, a fleece, a hat. When my parents finally bailed me out with a ticket home to Nevada, my mother greeted me at the airport, waiting outside our twenty-year-old station wagon, arms crossed.
“You think you’re Mr. Big Shot?” she said. “We dipped into our retirement funds to cover your debt. The invoice is in your room. You’re paying us back, in case you didn’t get the hint.”